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Greek Orthodox Church leaders send Christmas messages

Christmas, as well as Easter, is a time for church primates to send out spiritual messages to the faithful.

Ecumenical Patriarch Vartholomeos noted that Jesus' coming “in flesh” to live among the people is the antithesis to a notion of an abstract God. The Patriarch warned against both a materialistic and atheistic denial of the spiritual world and a religious fundamentalism that rejects science and reason, disdains art and civilization, demonizes differences and retreats to an “inward-looking, fruitless spiritualism,” calling both approaches “dark labyrinths” and comparing them to old-time heresies that roiled the Church.

The birth of Jesus Christ opens the road for the triumph of life, says Ieronymos, Archbishop of Athens and all Greece, who, nonetheless, warns against “human arrogance” and “individual desire as a source of meaning and as ethical imperative, in whose name even the biological facts of our existence are disdained.”

Archbishop Anastasios of Tirana, Durres and All Albania, called on the faithful to fight against all fear, keeping in mind that “Christ offers the effective antidote to the worry created by the virus of insecurity.”

“Christmas is here to remind us of an often forgotten truth: God is with us,” Archbishop Anastasios said.